VICTORIA - There must have been some bittersweet laughter across the provincial public sector Thursday afternoon, after the release of the auditor-general’s report on the fiscal farce that passes for bookkeeping at the legislative assembly.

Here’s the entity charged with scrutinizing and approving every penny spent by government in this province, whose members think nothing of summoning senior ministry officials to its committee rooms to account for their spending plans, sometimes in the dead of night.

Now here’s Auditor-General John Doyle on the assembly’s attention to detail on its own $70-million annual budget: “It clearly falls short of the basic accounting and financial management standards that the rest of the provincial public sector is required to meet.”

Or if you prefer a quote suitable for shouting from the rooftops: “If the legislative assembly were a public company, it would be delisted.”

The details are laid out in a 17-page report. Bank balances that bore no resemblance to bank statements. Invoices never reported. Accounts so out of whack that Doyle can’t begin to certify them as correct. An assembly that doesn’t file annual financial statements, rendering the audit trail somewhat bereft.

These findings did not come as a bolt from the blue. The auditor-general first put the assembly on notice about serious deficiencies in accounting practices in 2007.

He was ignored. “The results of this audit would likely have been much more positive had the legislative assembly implemented the recommendations made in my office’s 2007 report on the same topic,” as he noted Thursday.

Happily for taxpayers, Doyle is not a quitter. He kept pressing, management letter after management letter, caution after caution. More than a year ago, he sent a draft report to the Speaker’s office with a longer list of concerns. Later in the year, two more preliminary reports.

Still there was no rush to square up the books. Twice I wrote about the holdup in this space. The coverup continued.

Finally, after all the stalling and secrecy, Doyle put out a media release this week advising that he would be delivering a finished copy of his findings to the Speaker’s office on Tuesday morning. That did it.

After a hastily arranged conference call on Wednesday morning, Speaker Bill Barisoff and the leaders of both major parties agreed Doyle’s report should be made public straightaway, which is to say five years after he first raised the matter and more than a year after he began nagging the assembly with preliminary drafts.

Blame? I fault Barisoff first and foremost. In a media conference call, he tried to suggest that the problem involved some sort of “personality conflict” between the auditor-general and the legislature’s in-house comptroller.

Now Doyle can be prickly and he’s been known to quibble over an arcane accounting principle or two. But in this case, the clash appears to have involved his insistence on proper invoicing, regular financial statements and the simple notion that reported bank balances should reflect the actual amount of money on deposit.

Those would be the expected bookkeeping standards for the local birdwatching society, never mind the legislative assembly.

Barisoff has known about these concerns for a long time. Whether through bad advice or the imperiousness that sometimes infects the world-apart atmosphere of the legislature, he failed to act decisively to settle them.

I’d also blame the legislative assembly management committee (LAMC), an all-party committee chaired by Barisoff which is supposed to oversee the affairs of the assembly. It rarely meets, and then only in secret, and its decisions are not always made public.

Several years ago the committee delegated Barisoff and the then clerk of the legislature George MacMinn (who has since retired) to address Doyle’s concerns. But I’m told there is no minute to that effect.

John Horgan, a LAMC member in his capacity as house leader for the New Democrats, took his share of the blame for the laxity. He also disclosed that the committee has only been called into session a couple of times since he was appointed a year ago and he wasn’t shown a full copy of Doyle’s report, draft or otherwise, until Tuesday.

Horgan praised the new clerk of the legislature, Craig James, for getting the ball rolling on addressing Doyle’s concerns. But he agreed with the auditor-general that a lot more needs to be done. And soon.

Clearly LAMC needs a makeover. It has to meet regularly and in public. In camera only in the rarest instances. Financial oversight at the top of the agenda. Assembly accounts subject to access to information legislation. And the independent members of the legislature should have a rotating seat on the panel, to end suspicions about collusion between the two major parties.

Lastly there’s the fate of Doyle himself. At the same time as he’s blown the whistle on the assembly’s financial lapses, he’s up for reappointment. The selection committee, three Liberals and two New Democrats, is already in place. He needs unanimous endorsement for a second term. The man has guts.

Horgan, though not one of the members on the committee, volunteered an endorsement: “John Doyle has done a great service for the people of B.C. I would reappoint him in a second.”

I hope he spoke for all MLAs; he surely spoke for the public interest.

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